Thoughts on Booster Gold and Geoff Johns

So slugboy lent me the first new Booster Gold collection 52 Pickup over the weekend. I finished it up and have a few thoughts - with spoilers for those who haven't read it yet:

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As I mentioned to slugboy via e-mail, it started out pretty good. For a while, Johns tricked me into thinking that maybe the writer of "Stars and STRIPE" had returned to give us a nice, fun action-adventure time travel comic book - without his usual injection of "pointless angst" to mess with the fun. Booster flits around time righting things that others have set wrong - kind of a superhero "Quantum Leap" or maybe "Peabody and Sherman" given his team-up with Rip Hunter. And for the first part of the book things are actually great - Johns has Booster be both creative and relatively "grown-up" about his predicament as the guy who no one can know is really a hero.

And then Johns has Rip Hunter torture one of his enemies for information. There we go - that's the Geoff Johns I was expecting. Let's inject some pointless angst into this nice action-adventure comic, shall we?

After that, I started to lose interest in the story. I started looking at everything with a cynical eye, suspecting that every plot turn is just another way for Johns to set up his characters for failure. I have no faith that the "happy ending" at the end of the book is anything but Johns setting up a more extended version of the "lesson" that Rip Hunter taught Booster Gold about the impossibility of changing history. I'm also fairly certain that "Future Beetle" will turn out to be a villain who has manipulated Booster into setting up something bad that will enable the Future Beetle to take over the universe or something. And I haven't poked around the Internets for spoilers, so as far as I know this may already have happened in the monthly title.

So that's that - if slugboy snags the next collection from Half-Price Books I'll probably read it, but this didn't do anything to convince me that I needed to start picking up the monthly series myself. And it unfortunately reminded me of why I have a negative reaction whenever people start talking about Geoff Johns - he's a decent writer, but his incessant need to throw his characters into pointlessly angsty situations just drives me batty.

One final observation - the premise of the series has a definite piece of "fridge logic" that jumped out at me about a day after I finished the book. Booster has to be an ineffectual superhero because Rip tells him that if anyone knows that he's actually responsible for saving the world, his enemies will be able to hunt him down in the timestream and kill him as a baby to stop him. Fair enough. But then Booster continues to fight time-travelling baddies as Booster Gold. And he's effective at it. Which means that the guys who he most needs to fool into thinking he's an ineffectual doofus are the ones who know that it's just an act. It would have made more sense if Rip had had Booster use his doofus-hero identity as his "secret identity" and then use the persona of Supernova when he's battling baddies in the time stream. Not a huge deal, but it is a bit weird when you stop to think about it.

Humor in Comics

There's a new installment of Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed over at Comics Should Be Good. I love this feature, even when the things that Cronin posts aren't really urban legends but more "industry trivia". This one has a real urban legend though -- despite what I've heard around the Internets, Orson Welles was never making a Batman movie.

Anyway, go read them for yourselves. I want to blather specifically about a quote from Beau Smith in the second article:

I got a letter from DC telling me that Dan [Didio] figured that without the show being on TV and such that there wasn’t in their best interest to do the book now. I was disappointed and disagreed. Marketing and business 101 in the comic book direct market will tell you that there IS an audience for Wonder Woman and Xena going toe to toe. TV show or not. I was also told by one of the editors that Dan [Didio] wasn’t a fan of humor with their icon heroes. Wonder Woman being one of em’.

(Emphasis mine). First the caveats -- this is a quote from a second hand source (Smith) who heard it from "one of the editors" at DC. It's possible that either the editor or Smith didn't understand Didio's actual objection, or that Didio didn't actually have such an objection at all and the editor was misreading a situation.

With those caveats in mind, I'm going to make the assumption that this statement is basically true based on the evidence. Discounting All*Star Batman And Robin (which I contend is unintentionally funny and that Miller is trying to write it straight), there really isn't that much humor in the DC universe these days, at least in the core titles. Everything gets taken so seriously, or at least as seriously as you can take a bunch of people running around with their underwear on the outside of their bodies.


There's also the fact that the characters who have been abused the most by the current editorial regime are the ones from the 80's Justice League series by Keith Giffen and J.M. Demattias, whose primary characteristics were a lack of the "big guns" of the DC universe (due to editorial constraints) and TV comedy-style scripting that mixed intentional humor in with the typical superhero drama. In the minds of at least some fans, that era of Justice League is remembered as the "silly League", even though objectively it's much less silly than, say, Gardner Fox's Justice League of the 60's.

If Didio does have a dislike of superhero humor, one could see why he might want to use those characters as a way of drawing a line in the sand and saying "no more funny stuff". For the fans who have been around long enough (DC's target demographic these days), those actions were a very clear indicator of what was to come.


Apparently fun books suffer a sales hit. I'm actually not surprised by this in the least -- I've been around enough comic book stores to know where the general tastes of the comic buying public lie. Of course, looking at the sales of DC comics in the year after the end of Infinite Crisis shows they aren't doing all that well saleswise, even catering to the "I don't like fun in my comics" crowd.

This is not, by the way, an argument that catering to that crowd has hurt their sales. I think that is true for the long term, but the short-term horserace numbers between Marvel and DC don't support that at all, given that Marvel also seems to be attempting to get the "I don't like fun in my comics" readership. DC's problems seem to be more scheduling related -- while 52 consistently placed in the charts last year, other books that should be cornerstone books like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman slipped off the radar due to creative team juggling and the inability of the assigned creative teams to stick to a monthly schedule. Marvel doesn't do too much better with this scheduling stuff either -- look at the publishing schedule of Iron Man, for example, but they at least had a mega-crossover pushing things along through last year. DC had 52 which explicitly DID NOT crossover with any of the other books in their line, and so none of their "core" could get a boost from folks following their big event.

What does this mean for the long run? I suspect more of the same. If in the current market "fun" doesn't sell, and if there's no push to expand the market beyond the current fanbase, then the publishers will continue to "give the market what it wants". Those who like these types of things will keep buying them; those who don't like them will either stop buying them or (more likely) keep buying them and bitch about it. But there will be a stream of folks who just stop buying -- not in an ostentatious "I'm never buying a DC comic again" sort of way, but just drift away and find somewhere else to spend their time and money. Which is the best thing you can do, really, if you don't find what the "market" is giving you to be entertaining anymore.

New Writer on Titans

Newsarama has an interview posted with the new writer for Teen Titans, taking over with issue #50:

Sean McKeever

McKeever was already announced as the new writer on Birds of Prey when Gail Simone moves over to Wonder Woman.

Now, I'm not currently reading Titans in its monthly issue form. I HAD been picking up the trade paperbacks, but after the "Infinite Crisis" crossover paperback, I've been leery about picking up any of the new ones. I've read some of the individual issues sporadically at Borders in the post-"One Year Later" jump and, while there are some things that I like about them (Miss Martian in particular, though also Kid Devil), it hasn't been enough for me to think about jumping back onto Titans. The whole "death of Superboy" thing just sits like a pall over the whole book for me.

But McKeever -- he does do the teenage drama well from what I've seen. On the good side, he expressly likes the characters of Miss Martian and Kid Devil and wants to explore them more (wanting to explore more about Ravager is more neutral than good to me -- I just haven't been that interested in Rose since the arc where she became a psychotic nut under her father's tutelage). On the bad side, McKeever says he "really likes" the Titans Tomorrow story, a story that I thought was fairly derivative overall and just not that compelling. Revisiting that particular story arc doesn't thrill me in the least.

There are only some indications of what the "full roster" of the Titans will look like in the interview -- McKeever commits to Kid Devil, Miss Martian, Ravager, Wonder Girl, and Supergirl explicitly. There's an implicit assumption that Robin will also be on the team, and McKeever's careful choice of words indicates that Blue Beetle will not be on the team. I like this -- it's good to see the focus move off of the Wolfman/Perez roster of Titans and onto a new generation of teen heroes. I'm also already pre-disposed to like almost all of those characters (but can Robin please get a decent costume back? That red-and-black number just screams "target practice" to me).

Overall, I think I'll take a wait-and-see approach to the book. I could see it getting onto my monthly pull list. I could also see myself continuing to mostly ignore the book. I've been impressed by McKeever's work in the past, and I'm already planning on getting McKeever's Birds of Prey. Despite not really having the money to expand my pull list right now, I actually hope that the book is so good that I can't help but put it on my list.

Things that cheese me off (part the first)

Final Edit: (Hopefully) Mark Waid confirms "foot-in-mouth" on his part. He says it was a "botched joke", so there you go.

Another Edit: Graeme McMillan confirms that the original CBR story was edited to fix some misquotes and that the blog entry was likewise altered. The commenter "Matter Eater-Blog" also confirms that the quote was as I have it below, so this post stands. Again, I don't know if the interviewer misquoted Waid or if Waid asked for his comment to be taken off the record -- and I don't care. Regardless of why a posted story is changed there should at a minimum be an indication that the story has been edited if it is altered after publication.

Edit: Okay, now the quote is gone from the blog and from the linked interview. I cut and pasted this directly from the Blog@Newsarama post after confirming that it was in the original interview, and now it's gone. There's no indication that either post has been edited after the fact, but the quote is gone. I know that I cut and pasted it directly from the interview here, but apparently it's fallen into the Internet black hole. This is another thing that cheeses me off - folks who edit stories after they're posted without indicating that they've changed it.

The new quote reads:

Ralph's resolution was my favorite thing in "52." The scene with the "ghost detectives" was what we were always building to with Ralph. Based on his history, his personality and his character, there were only two possible payoffs for Ralph: he could have lived, but been miserable without Sue for the rest of his life, or we could have killed him. But simply killing him to be gratuitous didn't feel right. Killing a character that's been around since before you were born is, generally, a thoughtless and convenient path to take as a writer, and I've learned that the hard way.

via ComicBookResources

I'm cheesed off here because if you need to print a retraction, print a retraction. If you need to edit the post and drop a quote because someone realized they had "foot-in-mouth" disease, or because you misquoted them, at least put in a note to say that the story had been changed.

I'm leaving the rest of this post up for posterity, though whether the quote is legit or not, or conveys an accurate view of reality or not, is left as an exercise to the reader.

From a recent interview with Mark Waid (regarding the now finished 52 miniseries):

Ralph was my favorite thing in it. The scene with the ghost was what we were always building to with Ralph. There is only one resolution for Ralph: he could be miserable without Sue for the rest of his life, or we could have killed him. And Dan was pushing very hard to kill the character because Dan hates him.

But it didn’t feel right. It just felt gratuitous on top of everything else.

The "Dan" in this case is Dan Didio, high-mucky-muck of DC Comics. He's like Joe Quesada's evil twin (or would be, if Quesada himself weren't someone's evil twin - why do we get the universe with all of the evil twins in it, anyway?). The "Ralph" in this case is Ralph Dibny, the DC Comics character known as the Elongated Man, who recently had a happy ending to his story in the last issue of 52.

Kill Ralph "because Dan hates him." WTF? What kind of a whiny fanboy is Dan Didio? This isn't about killing the character for story reasons, or dramatic reasons, or just to shake things up. Sometimes those are excusable under the right circumstances. Instead, kill him because "I don't like him". Why? Because he's goofy? Because he's a fun character who hearkens back to a day when comics weren't so oppresively dark all of the time? Because Didio hates detectives? Because Ralph Dibny once kicked Didio's dog? Why would anyone "hate" a character like the Elongated Man anyway? Who has that kind of energy? It's not like he's Lobo or Wolverine or something. Didio was probably the kind of kid who broke his action figures in the sandbox too, just because he didn't want any other kids to play with them.

This has been the first in what is likely to be a long-running series of "Things That Cheese Me Off". Or, alternatively, "Rantings From An Old Man That Are Not About Kids Playing On His Lawn"...